Thursday, 14 April 2005

I've had my own personal hackfest this week, and it's been fun.

First, I tried to get Debian going on an E450 for use as a desktop in the terminal room (as you do). This worked, but I ran into some unpleasant video problems. So I tried taking dilinger's Sargeified Ubuntu xorg packages and building them, which worked, but presented a whole bunch of keymap problems, so I wrote that off as a failure.

Next, I dicked around with the slideshow presenting solution for the theatres when there isn't a presentation on. We've hijacked the PCs that are part of the theatres, and are netbooting them with Linux, and then they're going to VNC back into a central server using svncviewer (so they're pretty minimal), which will run a set of slides (which I must create tomorrow).

The piece de resistance was the access point I helped Bob with today for the backpackers hostel to provide delegates staying there with some wireless Internet access (we're hoping more than one person is actually going to stay there so they can avail themselves of this).

It's a small cased mini-ITX box, with a PCI wireless card and an iBurst modem hooked up to it, running a bit of NoCatSplash (just because I could) (I can't believe this isn't in Debian?). It's doing transparent proxying. It's not that exciting, but I think it's cool because we've essentially made our own bit fat access point with extra functionality to suit our requirements.

Tomorrow I need to make the aforementioned slides up, figure out how to make up a BOF sheet in L^AT_EX that doesn't suck, and do some general gophering. Probably thoroughtly test the backpacker's access point too.

I took this week off work to help do finishing touches to linux.conf.au and the weather has been fantastic. I really hope it keeps it up for next week. If it does, the decision to hold the conference in April will have really paid off.